The Getaway Special

29

“It’s intelligent,” she told Allen. He had come running, pistol held high and cocked, when she called to him. The butterfly had fled at his approach, but it had quickly returned to flutter over their heads, just far enough away that none of its artificial equipment was visible.

“No way,” he said. He held the pistol off to the side now, pointed at the ground.

“It’s wearing a pack, and it’s got some kind of—there!”

The tiny light had come back.

“What’s that?” Allen squinted at the butterfly, which hovered surprisingly still while it did whatever it was doing with the light.

“I think it’s a video camera,” Judy said.

“Oh, come on!”

“Well, what do you think it is?”

He held his free hand upward, palm up. “Come here, little guy. Let me get a good look at you.”

It dipped down, but stopped just out of reach. Allen lowered his hand, and it came a little closer.

“See?” Judy said. “It’s holding something in front of its face. Something that came out of a little belly pack. It’s got a stinger in that long sheath on the side, too.”

“Hmm. That’s sure what it looks like, all right. But that doesn’t mean it’s artificial. Something like that could evolve pretty easily.”

Then the light blinked once, went out for a second, blinked twice, went out again, blinked three times, another pause, then five.

“It’s counting every other number,” Judy said.

“Could still just be an instinctive biological thing,” Allen replied, but he held his breath as it finished blinking seven, paused for a second, then started blinking again. He began counting with it to keep track. “…Eight, nine, ten, eleven. Hah, it missed one.”

The light winked out, and the butterfly hovered over their heads, waiting.

“Nine’s not prime,” Judy said softly.

Allen looked at her, then back at the butterfly. “You’re kidding.”

“No,” Judy said. “I think it’s blinking prime numbers at us. Hold up one finger.”

“What for?”

“Just do it.”

Allen did, and Judy added both of her hands beside his, all ten fingers extended.

“Now hold out three.”

He did.

“Now… uh…”

“Seven,” he said, tucking the gun between his knees and holding up two fingers of one hand and all five of the other.

They held that position for a few seconds, then dropped their hands and waited to see what the butterfly would do.

It blinked the light again. Judy counted nineteen, then a pause, then twenty-three.

“I’ll be damned,” Allen said, carefully lowering the hammer on the gun and tucking it in the waistband of his pants. “It skipped twenty-one. I think you’re right. The thing’s intelligent.”

Judy shivered, thinking, Be careful what you ask for. “Now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How do we communicate with a bug?”

They just had, she supposed, but unless they could teach it Morse code, they were limited to math. Judy thought it over for a few seconds while the butterfly hovered patiently overhead, then she extended her hand out like Allen had done earlier, making a little landing pad. She held her other hand over it and fluttered her fingers like wings, then brought them down into her open palm.

“Let’s see if it understands an invitation,” she said.

“Even if it understands, it may not be brave enough to—”

Before Allen could finish his sentence, the butterfly swooped down and touched her palm, then backed away. Judy flinched, but she forced herself to keep her fingers extended. The touch had tickled, but if the butterfly saw her clench her fist, it would never trust her.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. “I’ll be careful.” She mimed landing again, and this time it followed her fingers down to stand on the muscle at the base of her thumb. It weighed no more than a couple of quarters.

She lowered her hand until her face was just inches from the butterfly. From there she could see its body in detail, but there wasn’t a whole lot of detail to see. Its wings were the same color blue from root to outer edge, and its body was shiny yellow, like their septic tank. It had a bulbous yellow head with one big oblong eye that wrapped halfway around, not faceted like an Earth bug’s, but smooth all the way across. It had eight legs, two of which were holding the source of the winking light: a metallic silver box with an unmistakable lens in front and an activity indicator above the lens. The butterfly held the box up to its eye again and the light came on.

“It’s filming,” she whispered. She couldn’t have spoken louder if she’d wanted to. She was surprised her voice worked at all. This was an intelligent alien, standing right on the palm of her hand. She swallowed, then said, “H-hello. My name’s Judy. What’s yours?”

If it replied, its voice was out of the range of her hearing, but it folded all of its wings to point straight up, then lowered them one at a time until all six touched her hand.

“What do you suppose that means?” she asked.

Allen shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue.”

This was the moment when a properly equipped interstellar explorer would break out the Universal Translator and immediately begin discussing trade relations with the aliens. Or failing that, they would at least start learning each other’s language, teaching one another concepts as diverse as love, courage, wonder, and “that’s mine” until they could converse like schoolmates. Judy supposed the latter might be possible, given enough time, but it assumed that the aliens at least had a language to learn.

“How about the computer?” she asked. “Can we use it to draw pictures or something?”

“What?”

“We’ve got to figure out some way to communicate with this guy. It doesn’t sound like he uses speech, so I thought maybe we could try pictures.”

Allen said, “Good idea, but I don’t have a drawing program.”

They hadn’t brought any paper or pens, either.

The butterfly raised and lowered its wings again; quickly on the upstroke, slowly going down. Judy imagined that was its equivalent of talking loudly for the foreigner, but it didn’t help her a bit.

She felt a sudden urge to clench her fist; not out of any desire to harm the butterfly, but merely because this was a fist-clenching moment if ever there was one. Here she was, meeting face-to-face with an intelligent alien, the first one humanity had ever found. This could be the most important discovery in history, even bigger than Allen’s, but it could just as easily turn into the most pathetic footnote for lack of a way to communicate.

“We use sound,” she said to it. “Words. My name is Judy.” She pointed to herself with her free hand, then pointed to Allen, “And that’s Allen.” For lack of anything better to say, she repeated it a couple of times, pointing back and forth. “Judy, Allen, Judy, Allen.”

The butterfly flapped its wings once more.

“How about the radio?” Allen said.

“The radio? But he’s right here.”

“It’s another way to communicate. If this little guy’s got a video camera, maybe he’s got a radio, too. We did hear a lot of static when we were in orbit; maybe some of that was actual transmissions.”

“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Judy said.

“I’ll go fire it up.” Allen backed away, then turned and jogged to the Getaway. Judy followed him at a slower pace, hoping the butterfly would stay put if she didn’t jostle it too much. It grew more and more agitated, flapping its wings and crawling around on her hand, but it didn’t fly away.

Nor did it settle down when she stopped beside the yellow plastic tank. Its wings quivered and its feet danced, tickling Judy’s skin. She wondered if it was truly excited or if she was reading human emotion into something completely different, but it certainly seemed to be doing a little victory dance on the palm of her hand. After a few seconds it settled down and turned its camera toward the makeshift spaceship, panning from one end to the other, then it did lift off and circumnavigate it once before coming to rest on Judy’s hand again.

Allen’s voice echoed from inside the tank. “I’m setting the frequency as high as it’ll go. That guy doesn’t have much room for a long antenna. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?”

He let up the microphone button, but there was only static.

“Okay, let’s try a little lower. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?”

Still just a little bit of static.

“Lower still. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?”

The butterfly dropped its camera.

The tiny box bounced off Judy’s palm and tumbled over the edge between her thumb and forefinger. She lunged for it with her other hand and caught it just a foot or so down, then tilted her hand until she could grasp it in her fingers and hold it out for the butterfly to take from her, but it wasn’t paying any attention. Its wings were quivering again, and all eight legs were moving at once, spinning it slowly around like a radar dish.

“I think he heard that,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Something spooked him.”

She took a closer look at the camera. It was no bigger than a watch battery, and a small one at that. The lens was the biggest part of it; an eighth of an inch across and just as long. If the camera were scaled up to human size, that would almost certainly be a zoom lens with macro capability. It connected to a boxy housing with tiny slots in the sides for the ends of the operator’s legs to fit into.

The radio crackled with static inside the Getaway, then Allen spoke again: “Hello out there. One. Two two. Three three three. Four four four four. Five five five five five.”

The static returned, rising and falling in waves, but the waves were the same length, separated by long and short pauses, and they came in sets of six, seven, and eight. Not primes this time, but Allen had simply been counting upward, so the butterfly had apparently decided to continue the same progression.

“Yes!” Allen called out triumphantly. “That’s him!”

“Oh, great,” Judy muttered. “Now we’re doing math over the radio.”

Then the receiver crackled again, and a voice like a kids’ toy with a string in the back said, “Oh, great. Now we’re doing math over the radio.”

“Who the hell was that?” Allen yelled.

“That was me. Our friend must have heard me and relayed it back to you.”

A second later, the radio echoed that, too.

“All right,” Allen said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Judy didn’t see that simple mimicry was all that much better than exchanging numbers, but she supposed it at least proved that the butterfly could hear her and make the same sounds. Over the radio, of course, but it was still sound.

Then the radio crackled again and the pulled-string voice said, “Skkkkk, one, two, three, four, five.”

“Math again,” she muttered, but Allen had already keyed the microphone and said, “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”

There was a pause, then the voice said, “Three… one, one, skkkkk three, seven, five, five.”

“What the heck is that, a phone number?” Judy asked.

Allen said, “No, it’s pi. Provided skkkkk is zero.”

“Yeah, right. Pi is three point one four one five nine something or other.”

“Not in base eight. And base eight is just what you’d expect from somebody who’s got eight legs.”

Judy stretched up and peered inside the tank at Allen. “You know pi in base eight?”

“No, I calculated it.”

“With what?”

“In my head.”

The radio crackled, and the scratchy voice said, “Yes! That’s him! Three point one four one five nine two six five.”

“Hot damn!” Allen said. “He heard you, and he filled it out to ten digits. That means he’s already figured out that we use decimal notation. This is going to be a piece of cake.”

Maybe for Allen, but Judy hadn’t come all this way to trade numbers. What were they going to do, start talking in sines, cosines, and tangents? This could be the trigonometry class from hell if she didn’t do something to derail it.

She held the tiny camera in front of the butterfly, and this time it took it from her with its front two legs. “What do you call that?” she asked. “We call it a camera.”

“We call it a camera,” the voice said over the radio.

She bent down and picked up a rock, then said, “This is a rock. Rock. Rock.”

“Rock,” said the voice over the radio.

She walked up to the closest tree and rested her hand against its trunk. “Tree.”

The radio was hard to hear from this distance, but she could just make out the scratchy reply: “Tree.”

“Now we’re talking,” she said.